Market Insights

As the competition for customer attention and brand loyalty escalates, consumers must decide what content is worth engaging with. In today’s highly dynamic and interactive business environment, the role of “customer engagement” in co-creating interactive customer experiences and value is receiving widespread attention from business practitioners and academics alike. It is suggested that customer engagement represents a strategic imperative for generating enhanced corporate performance, including sales growth, superior competitive advantage and profitability. The rationale being that engaged customers play a key role in viral marketing activity by providing referrals and/or recommendations for specific products, services and/or brands to others.

The brand experience is arguably the most valuable aspect of customer engagement today. The ability to win consumers over and activate sales through incredible brand experiences is integral to the success of businesses today. By creating experiences that matter and are shareable brands can attract and engage customers over a long period of time. For example, 98% of consumers create digital or social content at events and experiences and 100% share the content. Additionally, 72% of consumers say friends’ posts about branded experiences makes them more likely to purchase from said brand.

Customer engagement is a broad term that can describe any number of business functions such as customer experience, customer success, and marketing. Wikipedia describes “customer engagement” as a business communication connection between an external stakeholder and an organization through various channels of correspondence.

There’s nothing certain about the future, but by analyzing common trends, we can attempt to visualize where we are going. When referring to customer engagement, there is one trend that remains steadfast year-over-year. Can you take a wild guess what it is? If you guessed “personalization” then congratulations, you’re thinking like most marketing professionals today.